Was helping a user save a copy of a spreadsheet off SharePoint, doc was already opened with edit privileges as he had been working on updating some columns. He needed a CSV copy to upload off site so no big deal, file- save as bla.csv on desktop.

Well, like I said, they'd been watching the old 2k3 servers on this link all week up until this point

What is your NOC doing that they are staring at the links? @_@

If the link went to 100% I assume the NOC got an alarm and then they pulled up the graphs to see what was going on. Either that or they knew through good communications that there was going to be a state change and they wanted to monitor the situation. Either way I don't see a problem with it.

While we certainly have the monitoring set up that the NOC could sit and stare at links all week, in this case I was working directly with our network team (not the same as our NOC) to have special monitoring on that link for the week while we ran some extra traffic across it.

That I've lost the power cord part of my SATA-to-USB bridge and I have a hard drive I want to use it on.

I hate when that happens. The other day I discovered the power part of mine works fine but the USB to IDE/SATA bit has given up the ghost. Luckily I have another one on hand that had a failed power supply ages ago, though it's IDE only. Oh well, I have SATA hot swap bays in the top of my case now so I can wait a little bit to replace it. Pain in the butt, though. :\

...that people don't take kindly to phrases like, "If the idiots at wikipedia can figure out how to use a template, I'm sure that a highly skilled engineer like yourself can figure it out without my assistance."

flash back to removing `big iron`, during my university placement, we had to clear down the server room in order for them to shutdown the as/400, the mcdonnell douglas PIC server (running SOSCARE, which is still in use today!) and a few sundry others, think the size and heft of y2k proliants. You know the sort, dual redundant 500w psus, fans like jet turbines, made from 3mm thick pressed steel, basically not just old iron, but dinosaur iron.

I should mention, the healthcare trust, was recently converted from an asylum/sanitarium (for TB) and so, medical locations, private rooms etc, were all repurposed. The door was solid wood, secured by a yale lock (that could be sprung with a hairclip), the floor was carpetted in carpet that probably would have seen Winston Churchill crawling around on it as a toddler, the wallpaper was high class and fancy ... from 1952. Cooling was a window mounted ac unit, that was older than I am, and I think put out about 2Btu. Amidst that retro chic, sat our dinosaur iron, the comms rack (with dedicated bonded isdn !), the teletype, half a dozen vt100 terminals connected to various things and shelving units filled with instruction manuals that numbered 1 to 288 (errata are in 288-291).

In short, less of a server room, and more lots of servers shoved into a grandmothers back room.

So, we had to clear the boxes out, these were compaq 486 boxes and 14 inch crt boxes, piled ceiling to floor in almost every available space. I had a neat tunnel carved out for when I was asked to run PIC sql queries on teh soscare database - queries like SELECT FROM(soscare.tab) WHERE(age >65) AND WHERE(sex !=F) AND WHERE(postcode=BT9):-OUTPUT(lineprinter1) eh you get the idea. Since I was the gofer, I got tasked along with other placement students with clearing out the boxes. I get the bright idea to have a skip put below the server room window, so we could just heft them out a window, getting some bonus cooling into that room, great plan right?

So Im busily grabbing boxes and lobbing them a few feet out the window, think gorilla type arm swings, both hands grab box, lift and heave. All was going swimmingly, til my boss arrived... He decided to help out and starts grabbing boxes and chucking them out the window as well, and soon we had the room mostly cleared down. The last couple of boxes come up and we grab and bitch but uh .. that one felt a bit heav.. oh shit.... I tossed a brand new, never before opened monitor out a 1st floor window (2nd floor for yanks), it... did not fare well. The only thing that stopped me getting shitcanned was my boss did exactly the same thing at the same time, saw the pair of shattered screens in the skip and went `fuckit, theyve been in here a year untouched`.

I should also add, my first day at work on site.. one of the (happy shiney fun) patients got loose from the secure ward and hung himself from a tree near the entry, not a fun welcome to work. Two days later, there was an armed robbery on the patients bank, a robbery I missed walking into the middle of because I did due diligence. I had to go clean out an exploded toner unit from a laserjet 4, you know the ones the blocky beige/cream ones with the flip top/clam head. I went back because I was curious as to why it had asploded in the first place,given their generally tank like reliability. My curiousity was sated when I caught a staff member trying to feed acetate sheets through it... the sort you put on overhead projectors, NOT the sort you feed to laser printers.

Even with 4 "what logs should we capture" meetings before setting up a critical repro... someone will come along after with "Hey did you get this other log...." for something they never mentioned as being necessary. <sigh>

I'm sure purgatory involves something along the lines of racking and unracking a 5500 or ML530.

I still have a few of the latter (G1 and G2 and G3) in service. I'm hoping to kill them off soon.

P2V, that is all.

This is something I have been curious about. What happens if you try to P2V a Windows Cluster? Specifically we have 4 G3 servers, that are setup into two Windows Clusters (SQL), would that P2V all that well?

I'm sure purgatory involves something along the lines of racking and unracking a 5500 or ML530.

I still have a few of the latter (G1 and G2 and G3) in service. I'm hoping to kill them off soon.

P2V, that is all.

This is something I have been curious about. What happens if you try to P2V a Windows Cluster? Specifically we have 4 G3 servers, that are setup into two Windows Clusters (SQL), would that P2V all that well?

It should, though you'd probably have to stop all services on both nodes including the cluster service and of course setup the quorum disk correctly. My preference if it were at all possible would be to move to SQL 2012 with shared nothing clustering, but that probably won't be a possibility in most cases.

Today I learned that Chrome has an "inspect element" feature, that among other things, has a network tab showing you the total size of all elements loaded and the time it took to load them. Pretty awesome.

Today I learned that Chrome has an "inspect element" feature, that among other things, has a network tab showing you the total size of all elements loaded and the time it took to load them. Pretty awesome.

Hehe, since I spent the last two weeks in Firebug, Chrome's inspect element, and IE9's developer tools (and using Fiddler as well since the network history isn't complete in ANY of those tools) I find it amusing that someone just found them =)

The reason I originally learned Firebug is that one of my favorite sites radically changed their layout to something that was unsusable for me so I learned how to write Greasemonkey scripts to modify the DOM elements to massage it back into readable format. It's kind of amazing how much you can manipulate a web page with a little bit of knowledge and the right tools =)

I figured there were third party tools that would perform the functions but have never bothered to seek them out. Switched from FF to Chrome today and noticed it.

It quickly confirmed that a webpage was loading a bunch of 2-3MB multiple-megapixel photos just to re-size them down to 100x100 images that could've been 10K. Set that as the default webpage on 20 laptops using a 802.11G AP and it quickly gets overloaded.

I learned that accidentally connecting a heterogeneous network configured to use only MST to a homogeneous one using PVST by doing this:is not good. You end up with multiple Cisco switches with closed interfaces.

The culprit above took hours to find and had our network team cutting connections between segments of our LAN causing widespread havoc to internal services.

The owner of the laptop is in IT, had just returned from vacation and for unknown reasons had connected a cable directly to the laptop and then docked it. Obscurely, this does not constitute a problem as long as the laptop is turned on. However, after the owner of the laptop went home at the end of the day the laptop eventually went into sleep mode and at that point the docking station/laptop combo became a direct electric connection between the two networks.

Obscurely, this does not constitute a problem as long as the laptop is turned on. However, after the owner of the laptop went home at the end of the day the laptop eventually went into sleep mode and at that point the docking station/laptop combo became a direct electric connection between the two networks.

If your going to test an external hard drive on the ghost server, please make sure which partition your deleting is the right one. several hundred gig of images have now gone poof.

Removing malware on a Win7 x64 machine is done in 3 easy steps, so long as they are a normal user. Apparently being an admin may cause issues. 1. Log off as user and logon as the local admin.2. Delete the users profile3. have user log back in and set them back up.

Running sysprep on a Win7 machine joined to a domain will first remove the pc from the domain.

The owner of the laptop is in IT, had just returned from vacation and for unknown reasons had connected a cable directly to the laptop and then docked it. Obscurely, this does not constitute a problem as long as the laptop is turned on. However, after the owner of the laptop went home at the end of the day the laptop eventually went into sleep mode and at that point the docking station/laptop combo became a direct electric connection between the two networks.

That's just bizarre. I'd be raising hell with HP demanding an explanation. There's no good reason two separate NICs in the same system should bridge like that unless they're specifically configured to do so.

That's just bizarre. I'd be raising hell with HP demanding an explanation. There's no good reason two separate NICs in the same system should bridge like that unless they're specifically configured to do so.

It's not though. The docking port is just a physical extension of the built in jack.

It's not though. The docking port is just a physical extension of the built in jack.

Says who? My docking station and laptop NICs are separate, and that is how I connect to our two physical networks. To bridge them, that would be done in software, which doesn't work too well when power is not applied.

Something is also fishy since PVST/MST should've figured it out anyway, unless the laptop was dropping BPDUs.

Something is definitely fishy about our network though perhaps not Danger Mouse-worthy. The network is undocumented, the components are unserviceable, and the mindset of the network team seems to be dated. Add to that that we belong to a large conglomerate of companies and that we happen to be housed in the same building as other companies in the conglomerate and that those other companies have their own IT departments with little coordination and you have a recipe for disaster.

I am no network admin, so I rely on what information I am passed on. What I am told is that our non-Cisco switches broadcast any received STP traffic that they do not understand (e.g. PVST) on all ports on the default VLAN. Normally this would not be a problem simply because everything is configured to use MST. However, in this case a switch managed by one of the other conglomerate companies was connected to one of our switches. This network is a homogeneous Cisco network which uses PVST, but uses different VLANs. So our non-Cisco switches received PVST BPDUs which were broadcasted throughout our non-Cisco switches on the default VLAN which in turn was received by our Cisco switches - they saw something fishy (wrong VLAN in the BPDU) and shut down interfaces.

Again, not a network admin so the finer details of STP are lost on me. The above is my interpretation of the facts laid out to me and may be absolute bullshit.

It's not though. The docking port is just a physical extension of the built in jack.

Says who? My docking station and laptop NICs are separate, and that is how I connect to our two physical networks. To bridge them, that would be done in software, which doesn't work too well when power is not applied.

In this case, says HP. The laptops only have a single interface. We spent some time verifying that it only acts as a bridge when the laptop is turned off.

The next time someone asks me for an RJ45 coupler I'll hand them a laptop in a docking station and tell them to use that, noting that the laptop may not be turned on.

It's not though. The docking port is just a physical extension of the built in jack.

Says who? My docking station and laptop NICs are separate, and that is how I connect to our two physical networks. To bridge them, that would be done in software, which doesn't work too well when power is not applied.

Like Hamstro said, that is how the HP docks work, and the Dell ones too. You don't get another NIC while it's in the dock.